I laughed. “I doubt it.”
Ian tilted his head to one side, his expression speculative.
“Melanie Stryder?” he asked, addressing her.
We both started at the name.
Ian went on. “I’d like the chance to speak with Wanda privately, if you don’t mind. Is there any way that could be arranged?”
Of all the nerve! You tell him I said no chance in hell! I do not like this man.
My nose wrinkled up.
“What did she say?”
“She said no.” I tried to say the words as gently as they could be said. “And that she doesn’t… like you.”
Ian laughed. “I can respect that. I can respect her. Well, it was worth a try.” He sighed. “Kind of puts a damper on things, having an audience.”
What things? Mel growled.
I grimaced. I didn’t like feeling her anger. It was so much more vicious than mine.
Get used to it.
Ian put his hand on my face. “I’ll let you think about things, okay? So you can decide how you feel.”
I tried to be objective about that hand. It was soft against my face. It felt… nice. Not like when Jared touched me. But also different from the way it felt when Jamie hugged me. Other.
“It might take a while. None of this makes any sense, you know,” I told him.
He grinned. “I know.”
I realized, when he smiled then, that I wanted him to like me. The rest—the hand on my face, the fingers on my arm—I still wasn’t sure at all about those. But I wanted him to like me, and to think kind things about me. Which is why it was hard to tell him the truth.
“You don’t really feel that way about me, you know,” I whispered. “It’s this body.… She’s pretty, isn’t she?”
He nodded. “She is. Melanie is a very pretty girl. Even beautiful.” His hand moved to touch my bad cheek, to stroke the rough, scarring skin with gentle fingers. “In spite of what I’ve done to her face.”
Normally, I would have denied that automatically. Reminded him that the wounds on my face weren’t his fault. But I was so confused that my head was spinning and I couldn’t form a coherent sentence.
Why should it bother me that he thought Melanie was beautiful?
You’ve got me there. My feelings were no clearer to her than they were to me.
He brushed my hair back from my forehead.
“But, pretty as she is, she’s a stranger to me. She’s not the one I… care about.”
That made me feel better. Which was even more confusing.
“Ian, you don’t… Nobody here separates us the way they should. Not you, not Jamie, not Jeb.” The truth came out in a rush, more heated than I’d meant it to be. “You couldn’t care about me. If you could hold me in your hand, me, you would be disgusted. You would throw me to the ground and grind me under your foot.”
His pale forehead creased as his black brows pulled together. “I… not if I knew it was you.”
I laughed without humor. “How would you know? You couldn’t tell us apart.”
His mouth turned down.
“It’s just the body,” I repeated.
“That’s not true at all,” he disagreed. “It’s not the face, but the expressions on it. It’s not the voice, but what you say. It’s not how you look in that body, but the things you do with it. You are beautiful.”
He moved forward as he spoke, kneeling beside the bed where I lay and taking my hand again in both of his.
“I’ve never known anyone like you.”
I sighed. “Ian, what if I’d come here in Magnolia’s body?”
He grimaced and then laughed. “Okay. That’s a good question. I don’t know.”
“Or Wes’s?”
“But you’re female—you yourself are.”
“And I always request whatever a planet’s equivalent is. It seems more… right. But I could be put into a man and I would function just fine.”
“But you’re not in a man’s body.”
“See? That’s my point. Body and soul. Two different things, in my case.”
“I wouldn’t want it without you.”
“You wouldn’t want me without it.”
He touched my cheek again and left his hand there, his thumb under my jaw. “But this body is part of you, too. It’s part of who you are. And, unless you change your mind and turn us all in, it’s who you will always be.”
Ah, the finality of it. Yes, I would die in this body. The final death.
And I will never live in it again, Melanie whispered.
It’s not how either of us planned our future, is it?
No. Neither of us planned to have no future.
“Another internal conversation?” Ian guessed.
“We’re thinking of our mortality.”
“You could live forever if you left us.”
“Yes, I could.” I sighed. “You know, humans have the shortest life span of any species I’ve ever been, except the Spiders. You have so little time.”
“Don’t you think, then…” Ian paused and leaned closer to me so that I couldn’t seem to see anything around his face, just snow and sapphire and ink. “That maybe you should make the most of what time you have? That you should live while you’re alive?”
I didn’t see it coming the way I had with Jared. Ian was not as familiar to me. Melanie realized what he was going to do before I did, just a second before his lips touched mine.
No!
It wasn’t like kissing Jared. With Jared, there was no thought, only desire. No control. A spark to gasoline—inevitable. With Ian, I didn’t even know what I felt. Everything was muddled and confused.